


leaves overturned

by scionblad



Series: those strangely dressed [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Implied Relationships, M/M, Male Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 07:41:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7792744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scionblad/pseuds/scionblad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A ghost of a mention is all it takes for Leon to seek remnants of a memory made in Japan several years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	leaves overturned

**Author's Note:**

> Set two years after the events of my other fic, _those strangely dressed_ , in which Takumi is a kabuki actor and Leon is a cinema actor. Not much of this will really make sense unless you read the other first, so I highly suggest you do so before you read this one.
> 
> aka: this AU won't leave me alone damn it

Almost immediately after Leon had come back from shooting another film in Europe, Odin called him and demanded they meet. He obliged. France, for all of its grandeur of the old world and centuries of life, had been an isolating place. Not that New York wasn’t also an isolating place, with its streets rushing past you with people and cars, but New York was a different sort of loneliness, uncaring and unfeeling. Paris’s loneliness was an inviting kind, the kind that wished for pleasant talk and nostalgic times. It was that sort of loneliness he carried when he opened the door to let Odin and Zero in.

They settled for a nightcap in Leon’s apartment. He had lived separately from the rest of his family for only a few years, but it had already become a comfortable arrangement for him. He could shed the sentimentality of a family home for something practical and economical, as economical as you could get for a celebrity.

Zero had gone ahead and opened a Pinot Noir made sometime in the early 1900s—he rather liked to take advantage of Leon’s wine cabinet—and now Odin was chattering about anything and everything that had happened since Leon had been overseas. He didn’t pay attention, as exhausted as he was from the journey, so when his ears caught a single word, _Kanjinchō_ , his heart jumped.

“ _Kanjinchō_ ,” he echoed. It had been a long while since he’d spoken Japanese. The words felt awkward around his teeth.

Odin looked at him a little oddly. “Yes, the kabuki play!”

It’d been a long time since he’d thought about kabuki.

“Sorry,” Leon said, swirling the wine around in his glass. “I’m just tired.”

Odin’s expression softened. “It’s quite alright, milord.”

“Do continue,” he said. “And don’t call me ‘milord.’”

“Of course, milord,” said Odin with a sweeping gesture of his glass. “As I said, I was ever so surprised to find that they were performing a jewel of Japanese culture here in our very own metropolis! And knowing milord’s interest in such theater arts, I went to experience the spectacle for myself!”

“I see,” said Leon.

“It did not disappoint!” Odin gushed. “Like a woodprint come alive, a story of lords and samurai in the grandeur of all that lies within old Japan!”

“Yes, it is very much that,” said Leon, feeling his hands flutter out of their own accord. He was certain he’d said that phrase, sometime before, a long time ago, _all that lies within old Japan_. He reached inside a drawer on the table next to his chair for a cigar. Zero watched and said nothing. The gaze of his single eye pricked Leon’s skin, but he ignored it and concentrated on inhaling, exhaling. The smoke tasted familiar, but it didn’t comfort him.

Odin went on and on, moving on to more stories, and Zero made a snide remark occasionally, which Odin took in stride. Leon breathed the smoke in and out and settled for listening quietly.

Later that night, when he couldn’t sleep, he searched in the drawers of his bedroom for his pipe—not the normal one he used, but the thin one he’d bought several years ago when he stayed in Japan. It was nowhere to be found.

 _I must have left it in some hotel room in Paris_ , he thought to himself a little foolishly.

In reality there was no real truth to that, but he went to bed again, thinking it so many times that it became a truth.

 

 

He slept so long that it was well past noon when he finally awoke. Camilla visited him then, and he let her stay longer than he probably should have, drinking tea and indulging in the presents that she had asked him to buy in Europe.

“Did you have fun in Paris?” she asked while examining the shoes. Leon watched as her fingers searched the seams, felt the leather, rubbed the tough underside meant for contact with the ground.

“Work was work,” said Leon. “At that point it doesn’t matter whether it’s fun or not anymore.”

Camilla put the shoes down with a satisfied pat. “Well, that’s all right,” she said. “You always have worked so hard.”

He cast his eyes towards his cup. “Naturally.”

She smiled at him then. He felt a need to light a cigarette—the controlled breathing helped him regain his composure, but he refrained. She never liked smoke anyway.

“Marx is back in the States right now,” she said, stirring another sugar cube into her tea. “He’s actually on business. A troupe of actors from Japan is touring the country.”

“I see,” said Leon. “Did you go see them?”

“No,” she said carelessly. “It wasn’t to my interests.”

He couldn’t ask her about where’s and when’s, then. Somehow he’d been expecting for her to know. Maybe he shouldn’t have placed too much stock into things.

Camilla left before five o’clock, saying she had to meet Corrin for dinner. Leon resisted the urge to smoke again and saw her off. Then he went to the newspapers that had accumulated in his absence and began looking through them. A thought had occurred to him earlier to ask Odin or Marx, but after watching Camilla dismiss it over tea, he didn’t see the need to do it relying on others. It was strangely fitting, anyhow. He sought a remnant of a memory he’d shared in a moment of vulnerability, and such an affair was only meant to be undertaken alone.

He turned the page of a newspaper, and his fingers were drawn to the barely-raised shapes of the words. Names he knew. Leon swallowed, but his throat was dry, like speaking them would be impossible.

That was silly. He could say it just fine, but it came rushing with too much—of _something_. Something—he tried to hold it back, his hands fumbling for a cigarette—the shapes were fuzzy and unclear, only moments and snippets of words, tastes, spinning fans, a face painted in white.

He managed to light the cigarette, and inhaled deeply—too deeply. He started coughing. It had been this long since he’d taken up the smoking habit and to still cough like an amateur.

Leon fixed his eyes on the painting across the room and focused on breathing an easy stream of smoke. It would be fine, so long as he stayed where he was. At eight o’clock he was supposed to meet someone—actually, someone he was supposed to consider for marriage, but that was largely unimportant. He busied himself by going to his library and picking a book to read, but the words floated in and out of the logical order of sentences. The smoke did little to calm him.

 

 

At seven-thirty, he called for his driver, fed up with the vibrating feeling in his heart, and asked him to drive to Midtown between 6th and 7th Avenue instead of where Camilla had told him to go. He would miss meeting the someone at eight, but sitting around and doing as he was told was something he didn't want to do at the moment.

He had the car stop several blocks from the area, and walked the rest of the way to the theatre. People were gathered around the entrance, but the crowd was thinning out; evidently the show had finished. Leon skirted around them to a staff entrance he’d been through with Odin many times and climbed stairs and hallways to the dressing rooms. He pushed past the bustle of stagehands and costume handlers, eyes probing for the one name he knew—the one that he _knew_.

He stopped at the door at the end of the hallway. The name on the card was neatly printed. His chest prickled coldly with a numb excitement.

With a dry throat, he knocked on the door gently.

“Takumi?” he whispered, ignoring his lungs screaming for a smoke.

There was no response. He knocked again. Silence answered.

Leon breathed to steady his hands, and then opened the door.

The room was empty. Not even the rack held a costume.

He stopped a girl with drooping eyes and asked in Japanese, “Where are the actors?”

“They left immediately after the performance ended,” she said. “They’re leaving for California tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” he said, but she was already gone. Feeling out of place in the rush of Japanese crew buzzing around, he quickly went into the dressing room, and closed the door to quietness.

To think that he had been so close, and yet so far away. What a foolish, pointless endeavor this had been. He wiped the sweat off of his forehead, cursing New York’s late-summer dry heat, and sat down in front of the mirror.

Only a few hours earlier had someone else sat where Leon sat now, perhaps applying white grease-paint to his face and neck, fitting his head with a heavy wig, lining his eyes and brows black. Only a few hours earlier, had the stage come alive like a woodblock print in motion, dancing in time to shamisen and shrill flutes—maybe that person who had sat where Leon sat now had walked down makeshift flower walkway as people called his name in pride.

Leon reached inside his jacket pocket. He needed a smoke, badly. Since no one was going to use this room for the rest of the night, it might be all right to have a quick one. He exhaled the smoke and watched it curl around the bulbs surrounding the mirror.

There was a slip of paper on the table in front of the mirror. He hadn’t noticed it when he came in. The writing on it was Japanese. What little of the language he remembered managed to be enough to make sense of the short lines.

In somewhat breezy strokes, it said:

 _While, waiting for you_  
_my heart is filled with longing_  
_the autumn wind blows—_  
_as if it were you—_  
_swaying the bamboo blinds of my door_

He almost started laughing, then. How odd it was that fate sometimes blew every which direction, only for the grain to settle neatly arranged like this.

Slowly, Leon closed his lips around the end of his cigarette. He ran a thumb across the strokes of ink, thinking of the writer’s downturned, melancholic eyes, lighter than the usual black of his countrymen. He imagined soft hair falling over a forehead painted white, warm bathwater lapping at the clean line of collarbone, a mouth laughing in an izakaya.

He folded the paper in half and tucked it in his jacket pocket, next to his case of cigarettes. The smoke from his cigarette rose and drifted near the ceiling of the room. For a long time, he sat, remembering.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this very quickly so if it is at all sloppy or rough, now you know why. As for why this is in past tense and the predecessor is in present—Leon muse talks in past tense I guess? 
> 
> Cultural notes—
> 
> * _Kanjinchō_ is one of the most (if not THE most) popular kabuki plays in all of its repertoire. Its story tells of Togashi, an aristocrat, who guards a barrier to the north, and of Yoshitsune and his retainer Benkei, who attempt to flee to the north disguised as as porter and a priest, respectively. [This page has a good summary of the play.](http://www.kabuki21.com/kanjincho.php)
> 
> * "flower walkway" refers to the long walkway built protruding from the side of the stage and running back towards the house. Dramatic entrances are often made on this walkway.
> 
> * "calling name" — I didn't explain this in the previous notes because it was already long enough but during certain moments of kabuki plays people will sometimes shout out the names of the actors (though in order to do this you really have to know when to do it). 
> 
> * The poem at the end is from the Man'yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry.


End file.
